Woman of the Dunes DVD

'Woman of the Dunes' Director: Hiroshi Teshigahara (1964) BFI DVD |  Staff Pick  | Japanese w/ English subtitles

One of the 1960s’ great international art-house sensations, Woman in the Dunes was for many the grand unveiling of the surreal, idiosyncratic world of Hiroshi Teshigahara and writer Kōbō Abe (Face of Another, Pitfall).

When an amateur entomologist who has left Tokyo to study an unclassified species of beetle in a vast desert misses his bus back to civilization, he is persuaded to spend the night with a young widow in her hut at the bottom of a sand dune. What results is one of cinema’s most unnerving and palpably erotic battles of the sexes, as well as a nightmarish depiction of everyday life as a Sisyphean struggle.

Accompanied by a jarring and abrasive experimental score by master composer Tōru Takemitsu (Pale Flower, Kwaidan, Ran, Blind Beast).